During a source code audit, Chris Evans discovered several buffer overflows in libpng. An attacker could create a carefully crafted PNG file in such a way that it would cause an application linked with libpng to execute arbitrary code when the file was opened by a victim. The Common Vulnerabilities and Exposures project (cve.mitre.org) has assigned the name CAN-2004-0597 to these issues.

In addition, this audit discovered a potential NULL pointer dereference in libpng (CAN-2004-0598) and several integer overflow issues (CAN-2004-0599). An attacker could create a carefully crafted PNG file in such a way that it would cause an application linked with libpng to crash when the file was opened by the victim.